Enhancing Rating-Based Reinforcement Learning to Effectively Leverage Feedback from Large Vision-Language Models

Designing effective reward functions remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as it often requires extensive human effort and domain expertise. While RL from human feedback has been successful in aligning agents with human intent, acquiring high-quality feedback is costly and labor-intensive, limiting its scalability. Recent advancements in foundation models present a promising alternative--leveraging AI-generated feedback to reduce reliance on human supervision in reward learning. Building on this paradigm, we introduce ERL-VLM, an enhanced rating-based RL method that effectively learns reward functions from AI feedback. Unlike prior methods that rely on pairwise comparisons, ERL-VLM queries large vision-language models (VLMs) for absolute ratings of individual trajectories, enabling more expressive feedback and improved sample efficiency. Additionally, we propose key enhancements to rating-based RL, addressing instability issues caused by data imbalance and noisy labels. Through extensive experiments across both low-level and high-level control tasks, we demonstrate that ERL-VLM significantly outperforms existing VLM-based reward generation methods. Our results demonstrate the potential of AI feedback for scaling RL with minimal human intervention, paving the way for more autonomous and efficient reward learning.

ConfPO: Exploiting Policy Model Confidence for Critical Token Selection in Preference Optimization

We introduce ConfPO, a method for preference learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) that identifies and optimizes preference-critical tokens based solely on the training policy's confidence, without requiring any auxiliary models or compute. Unlike prior Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which uniformly adjust all token probabilities regardless of their relevance to preference, ConfPO focuses optimization on the most impactful tokens. This targeted approach improves alignment quality while mitigating overoptimization (i.e., reward hacking) by using the KL divergence budget more efficiently. In contrast to recent token-level methods that rely on credit-assignment models or AI annotators, raising concerns about scalability and reliability, ConfPO is simple, lightweight, and model-free. Experimental results on challenging alignment benchmarks, including AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard, demonstrate that ConfPO consistently outperforms uniform DAAs across various LLMs, delivering better alignment with zero additional computational overhead.

TARO: Timestep-Adaptive Representation Alignment with Onset-Aware Conditioning for Synchronized Video-to-Audio Synthesis

This paper introduces Timestep-Adaptive Representation Alignment with Onset-Aware Conditioning (TARO), a novel framework for high-fidelity and temporally coherent video-to-audio synthesis. Built upon flow-based transformers, which offer stable training and continuous transformations for enhanced synchronization and audio quality, TARO introduces two key innovations: (1) Timestep-Adaptive Representation Alignment (TRA), which dynamically aligns latent representations by adjusting alignment strength based on the noise schedule, ensuring smooth evolution and improved fidelity, and (2) Onset-Aware Conditioning (OAC), which integrates onset cues that serve as sharp event-driven markers of audio-relevant visual moments to enhance synchronization with dynamic visual events. Extensive experiments on the VGGSound and Landscape datasets demonstrate that TARO outperforms prior methods, achieving relatively 53\% lower Frechet Distance (FD), 29% lower Frechet Audio Distance (FAD), and a 97.19% Alignment Accuracy, highlighting its superior audio quality and synchronization precision.

ITA-MDT: Image-Timestep-Adaptive Masked Diffusion Transformer Framework for Image-Based Virtual Try-On

This paper introduces ITA-MDT, the Image-Timestep-Adaptive Masked Diffusion Transformer Framework for Image-Based Virtual Try-On (IVTON), designed to overcome the limitations of previous approaches by leveraging the Masked Diffusion Transformer (MDT) for improved handling of both global garment context and fine-grained details. The IVTON task involves seamlessly superimposing a garment from one image onto a person in another, creating a realistic depiction of the person wearing the specified garment. Unlike conventional diffusion-based virtual try-on models that depend on large pre-trained U-Net architectures, ITA-MDT leverages a lightweight, scalable transformer-based denoising diffusion model with a mask latent modeling scheme, achieving competitive results while reducing computational overhead. A key component of ITA-MDT is the Image-Timestep Adaptive Feature Aggregator (ITAFA), a dynamic feature aggregator that combines all of the features from the image encoder into a unified feature of the same size, guided by diffusion timestep and garment image complexity. This enables adaptive weighting of features, allowing the model to emphasize either global information or fine-grained details based on the requirements of the denoising stage. Additionally, the Salient Region Extractor (SRE) module is presented to identify complex region of the garment to provide high-resolution local information to the denoising model as an additional condition alongside the global information of the full garment image. This targeted conditioning strategy enhances detail preservation of fine details in highly salient garment regions, optimizing computational resources by avoiding unnecessarily processing entire garment image. Comparative evaluations confirms that ITA-MDT improves efficiency while maintaining strong performance, reaching state-of-the-art results in several metrics.

E-MD3C: Taming Masked Diffusion Transformers for Efficient Zero-Shot Object Customization

We propose E-MD3C ($\underline{E}$fficient $\underline{M}$asked $\underline{D}$iffusion Transformer with Disentangled $\underline{C}$onditions and $\underline{C}$ompact $\underline{C}$ollector), a highly efficient framework for zero-shot object image customization. Unlike prior works reliant on resource-intensive Unet architectures, our approach employs lightweight masked diffusion transformers operating on latent patches, offering significantly improved computational efficiency. The framework integrates three core components: (1) an efficient masked diffusion transformer for processing autoencoder latents, (2) a disentangled condition design that ensures compactness while preserving background alignment and fine details, and (3) a learnable Conditions Collector that consolidates multiple inputs into a compact representation for efficient denoising and learning. E-MD3C outperforms the existing approach on the VITON-HD dataset across metrics such as PSNR, FID, SSIM, and LPIPS, demonstrating clear advantages in parameters, memory efficiency, and inference speed. With only $\frac{1}{4}$ of the parameters, our Transformer-based 468M model delivers $2.5\times$ faster inference and uses $\frac{2}{3}$ of the GPU memory compared to an 1720M Unet-based latent diffusion model.

DriVLM: Domain Adaptation of Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving

In recent years, large language models have had a very impressive performance, which largely contributed to the development and application of artificial intelligence, and the parameters and performance of the models are still growing rapidly. In particular, multimodal large language models (MLLM) can combine multiple modalities such as pictures, videos, sounds, texts, etc., and have great potential in various tasks. However, most MLLMs require very high computational resources, which is a major challenge for most researchers and developers. In this paper, we explored the utility of small-scale MLLMs and applied small-scale MLLMs to the field of autonomous driving. We hope that this will advance the application of MLLMs in real-world scenarios.

Soft-TransFormers for Continual Learning

Inspired by Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), which provides suboptimal fine-tuning solutions, we propose a novel fully fine-tuned continual learning (CL) method referred to as Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF). Soft-TF sequentially learns and selects an optimal soft-network or subnetwork for each task. During sequential training in CL, Soft-TF jointly optimizes the weights of sparse layers to obtain task-adaptive soft (real-valued) networks or subnetworks (binary masks), while keeping the well-pre-trained layer parameters frozen. In inference, the identified task-adaptive network of Soft-TF masks the parameters of the pre-trained network, mapping to an optimal solution for each task and minimizing Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) - the soft-masking preserves the knowledge of the pre-trained network. Extensive experiments on Vision Transformer (ViT) and CLIP demonstrate the effectiveness of Soft-TF, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various CL scenarios, including Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) and Task-Incremental Learning (TIL), supported by convergence theory.

Physics Informed Distillation for Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have recently emerged as a potent tool in generative modeling. However, their inherent iterative nature often results in sluggish image generation due to the requirement for multiple model evaluations. Recent progress has unveiled the intrinsic link between diffusion models and Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs), thus enabling us to conceptualize diffusion models as ODE systems. Simultaneously, Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have substantiated their effectiveness in solving intricate differential equations through implicit modeling of their solutions. Building upon these foundational insights, we introduce Physics Informed Distillation (PID), which employs a student model to represent the solution of the ODE system corresponding to the teacher diffusion model, akin to the principles employed in PINNs. Through experiments on CIFAR 10 and ImageNet 64x64, we observe that PID achieves performance comparable to recent distillation methods. Notably, it demonstrates predictable trends concerning method-specific hyperparameters and eliminates the need for synthetic dataset generation during the distillation process. Both of which contribute to its easy-to-use nature as a distillation approach for Diffusion Models. Our code and pre-trained checkpoint are publicly available at: https://github.com/pantheon5100/pid_diffusion.git.

TPC: Test-time Procrustes Calibration for Diffusion-based Human Image Animation

Human image animation aims to generate a human motion video from the inputs of a reference human image and a target motion video. Current diffusion-based image animation systems exhibit high precision in transferring human identity into targeted motion, yet they still exhibit irregular quality in their outputs. Their optimal precision is achieved only when the physical compositions (i.e., scale and rotation) of the human shapes in the reference image and target pose frame are aligned. In the absence of such alignment, there is a noticeable decline in fidelity and consistency. Especially, in real-world environments, this compositional misalignment commonly occurs, posing significant challenges to the practical usage of current systems. To this end, we propose Test-time Procrustes Calibration (TPC), which enhances the robustness of diffusion-based image animation systems by maintaining optimal performance even when faced with compositional misalignment, effectively addressing real-world scenarios. The TPC provides a calibrated reference image for the diffusion model, enhancing its capability to understand the correspondence between human shapes in the reference and target images. Our method is simple and can be applied to any diffusion-based image animation system in a model-agnostic manner, improving the effectiveness at test time without additional training.

Mitigating Adversarial Perturbations for Deep Reinforcement Learning via Vector Quantization

Recent studies reveal that well-performing reinforcement learning (RL) agents in training often lack resilience against adversarial perturbations during deployment. This highlights the importance of building a robust agent before deploying it in the real world. Most prior works focus on developing robust training-based procedures to tackle this problem, including enhancing the robustness of the deep neural network component itself or adversarially training the agent on strong attacks. In this work, we instead study an input transformation-based defense for RL. Specifically, we propose using a variant of vector quantization (VQ) as a transformation for input observations, which is then used to reduce the space of adversarial attacks during testing, resulting in the transformed observations being less affected by attacks. Our method is computationally efficient and seamlessly integrates with adversarial training, further enhancing the robustness of RL agents against adversarial attacks. Through extensive experiments in multiple environments, we demonstrate that using VQ as the input transformation effectively defends against adversarial attacks on the agent's observations.